TRENTONIAN EDITORIAL: Brainiac bid

Congressman Rush Holt, joining the mad dash for the Lautenberg Senate seat, declares in a campaign video that he’s no Cory Booker, the prohibitive favor in the special primary election.

In the video, the congressman uses a college lecture hall as his backdrop, a subliminal way of saying in effect, “No, I’m not Cory Booker nor the others in the race. I’m the SMART one!”

And indeed he is. He’s the guy with the bumper stickers that say: “My congressman IS a rocket scientist.” Which, again, indeed he is. Or was before going off to Congress. (There’s a possibility he’s dropped a couple of IQ points hanging out in such a milieu of mediocrity. but he’s got points to spare.)

Holt adds that he’s going to win the race the same way he once won on “Jeopardy” and the same way he beat “Watson,” the supercomputer — “one answer at a time.”

Now, Holt has always been a little bit too much of a Pavolvian-response liberal for our tastes, but we’ll readily concede he’s a dedicated public servant and bright in the bargain, practically blinding compared to some of the low-watt bulbs in the body where he serves.

But we keep wondering whether anybody in his campaign has reminded him how, generally speaking, other kids in the class tend to regard the brainiac who always knows all the answers?

Or is the Congressman a chess move ahead of us? Does he have focus group data revealing a huge Jersey sleeper vote for a candidate who cultivates an image of the archetypal pencil-neck geek?

ABSURDITY PASSAsst. Prof. Salamishah Tillet of the University of Pennsylvania appears on PBS, CNN, etc., as a guest pontificator. There are no limits on abject nonsense regarding assertions spouted by “scholars” of her ideological ilk. (Her fields are Africana and Gender & Sexuality studies.) She topped herself on MSNBC the other day with the insight that a proposed bill to ban late-term abortions is a Republican bid to increase white births in response to racist fears of a surging minority population.

Nobody on the show had the stones to say, “Well, professor, have you ever pondered the fact that the abortion rate among blacks is more than triple the rate among whites?” Nobody dared asked the question because, as we say, with assertions from her ilk it’s always a fatuity-free zone. Indeed, much of academia has become a fatuity-free zone.